


through whoever you've been

by theseerasures



Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-19 07:50:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22741201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseerasures/pseuds/theseerasures
Summary: Ever since they started living apart Elsa comes over like clockwork, within 48 hours of Anna sending her a letter.WheneverAnna sends her a letter, even when Anna just wants to vent about queen stuff or ask where Elsa’d stashed her leftover birthday chocolate since obviously she’d forfeited rights to them by moving out (that time Elsa had ridden all the way back to Arendelle just to yell from the grounds that Anna was never going to find her chocolate in a million years, which—fine, fair, chocolate is Sacred). It’s just a thing that Elsa does, one on top of several, and Anna hadn’t really paid attention to it until now.Post-Frozen II: a conversation between sisters as they get used to their new dynamic.
Relationships: Anna & Elsa (Disney)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 39





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Now with author's commentary in second chapter! Please view as Entire Work to get endnotes to work.

[1]It takes a while for Anna to realize.

Well, actually—it takes until Kristoff points it out to her, but y’know. It’s not too, too obvious. She doesn’t send _that_ many letters into the forest, because she’s busy doing queen stuff and she knows Elsa’s busy doing protector-guardian-magic-nature stuff, and Gale’s probably also busy being…wind. None of them have the time to just send silly notes back and forth _all the time_ (just sometimes). And…well. Anna’d like to think that they don’t need to anymore, that her love is getting less and less fragile, too.[2]

Add that to the fact that half the time Anna sends Elsa a letter it _is_ to invite her sister over, and. Yeah. Kristoff.

They’d been having their regular lunch date, catching each other up on what was already done and what there was left to do. Anna had mentioned, offhand, that she’d written Elsa a note the night before to ask about some old land rights issue her council was squabbling over, and Kristoff had replied, just as offhand, that he’d let the staff know to set another place at dinner, and Anna had been so touched at how thoughtful he was being and so proud at how awesome and in-tune and efficient they were being together that she’d totally missed the implications until three conversation topics later. “Wait, what? Who’s coming over?”

Kristoff had looked at her like she was being obtuse on purpose. “You just told me you sent Elsa a letter.”

“Yeah, but it was just a question about the year. She can send me the answer with a note.”

“She _can_ ,” Kristoff had agreed, “But c’mon, Anna. Can you think of a time when Elsa didn’t answer a note from you face-to-face?”[3]

“ _Yes,_ ” Anna had immediately replied with one hundred percent confidence, but then she’d thought about it, and…no, actually. Ever since they started living apart Elsa comes over like clockwork, within 48 hours of Anna sending her a letter. _Whenever_ Anna sends her a letter, even when Anna just wants to vent about queen stuff or ask where Elsa’d stashed her leftover birthday chocolate since obviously she’d forfeited rights to them by moving out (that time Elsa had ridden all the way back to Arendelle just to yell from the grounds that Anna was never going to find her chocolate in a million years, which—fine, fair, chocolate is Sacred). It’s just a thing that Elsa does, one on top of several, and Anna hadn’t really paid attention to it until now.

Then of course Elsa _does_ show up for dinner that night, even apologizing for being late (late for _what?_ ), because she’d been doing…something. She’s trying to tell them, but it’s mostly just contextless details that Anna can’t really make heads or tails of, except that it happened a long ways from Arendelle and Elsa’d ridden through the night before to make it over here. She looks happy and fulfilled and smells like crisp wintry air and Anna _is_ ecstatic to see her, even if Kristoff keeps smirking about being right, which is ten levels of distractingly annoying and thirty levels annoyingly distracting and makes it harder for Anna to follow Elsa’s story during dinner or concentrate during their quick game of Pictionary after.[4]

And okay, fine; it’s also hard to focus because Anna’s still kind of thinking about it. Why _does_ Elsa come back every time, even though she clearly has other stuff going on and can just write back?

It’s not like Elsa _can’t_ write (she was queen, duh—that’d be crazy if she couldn’t).[5] Maybe it’s just hard to find a pen when she’s gallivanting all over the nature? But that seems silly, too: it’s not like Elsa can’t magic another pocket into her dress to carry something to write with, and even if she can’t it’d still be easier to just _find a pen_ compared to riding all the way to the castle. Maybe she just misses Gerda’s cooking?

_Or maybe_ , a niggling little voice whispers in the back of her head, _she comes back all the time because she thinks you can’t handle being in charge_.

Something nudges her, snaps her out of it. “You okay?” Elsa asks, “You looked miles from here.”

“Yeah!” Anna says at once. They’re in the library now, trying to dig up the book that Elsa thinks might be relevant to the land thing, and this for some reason makes her stomach tighten even more. Elsa is just better at the record-keeping paperwork stuff; Anna is _trying—_ brushing up on all the boring numbers work she’d slept through as a kid—but it all seems to evaporate in her head. Maybe she isn’t doing a good enough job as queen; Father probably never had to write any family members for legal advice.[6]

She looks over at her sister again. Elsa looks…tired. Not all used up, like she sometimes did in the early days after the Thaw when she was trying to work away all her bad feelings ever, but still. Tired. Like she’d spent the night before on horseback and is staying up late again to pick up the slack for Anna.

“Elsa,” she finally says. She’s being dumb, and even if—even if she _isn’t_ completely off the mark there are better ways to deal with this than having whole big insecurity parades in her head.[7] “You know you can just write back to me, right?”

Apparently that hadn’t been the best way to open this conversation, because Elsa stiffens right up. “Oh,” she says, her eyes still fixed on the book in her lap.

“Not that—not that I don’t want you here!” Anna immediately says, wincing as she hears her own voice leap two octaves in her rush to reassure. “I just mean that. Um.” She tugs on one of braids, then just lets it all out: “IknowIaskforhelpwithalotofqueenstuff–”

“Anna!” Great, now Elsa’s at least making eye contact, but she also looks really alarmed. “Slow down.”

She takes a deep, settling breath. “I just. Kristoff said that you always come over whenever I send you Gale letters, and I thought about it, and I think he’s right, so I just wondered. We _have_ a magic wind note-passer, but you never use her, and I guess I’m wondering…why?”

Elsa’s turned back to the book in her lap, keeps flipping through the pages even though Anna knows she’s not really reading. When she does look up again she’s wearing the Face. It’s the thinking-about-bad-times face, where her expression is strained and her mouth twitches non-stop, like she’s trying to figure out if she’s allowed to frown and be upset or should smile and reassure herself that it’s over.

(Apparently Anna has a version of it, too; Kristoff had tried to mimic it once and Anna had laughed so hard she’d started crying, and then couldn’t stop, even after he’d picked her up and held her close to his chest.)[8]

The Face shows up less and less now, but Anna still knows it on sight, and it makes her even more nervous. She opens her mouth to say something, but Elsa beats her to it. “You used to write me notes,” she says, quiet as her arms curl around her own torso. “Remember?”

Anna blinks. “Of course.” The Olaf Christmas cards, obviously, and then there was that time, a little after she’d turned thirteen, when she decided that if Elsa wouldn’t look at her maybe they could at least write each other. She started slipping all kinds of little scraps under the locked door, and it even seemed kind of exciting, like having a friend from faraway. Then months went by without Elsa ever writing back, and Anna gave up.

She gave up a lot on Elsa, back in the day. It never stuck.[9]

But that—Anna’s stomach might just be a shriveled up ball now, with how much it keeps clenching–that feels even _worse_ , because what does that make her if Elsa’s doing all of this because she feels guilty? She’s not just a bad queen, then; she’s—some kind of needy leech, another obligation weighing her sister down. “That’s what this is?” she asks, feeling her voice shake with…she’s not sure. “You’re trying to make up for before?”

“No!” Elsa replies, her eyes wide. “It’s not that.“

“Then what is it?” Anna demands. Maybe it’s _anger_ that she’s feeling, actually, at herself and at Elsa, because they keep trying to work through this but it always ends up boomeranging back.

Elsa just looks at her for a moment, bewildered, before she sighs. “I couldn’t write to you back then, but I didn’t _want_ to, either. You were right there, on the other side of my door, and I wanted to _see_ you. Talk to you. I hated that I still wanted to do that, and I hated that I was making you…concoct all these elaborate plans to talk to me even though we were under the same roof. So now, whenever I get your notes…I still just want to see you. We don’t live in the same place anymore, but I have the Nokk, and what’s the point of having a magic horse if I can’t visit my sister whenever I want, right? So I guess I…”

She looks away again, worrying her bottom lip. “I know it’s silly,” she continues hesitantly. Then her shoulders square up. “And I can stop, Anna, if you think I’m crowding you or intruding on your—”[10]

“No!” Anna replies immediately, throwing her arms around her sister. “You’re not— _I_ thought you were coming back because you thought I couldn’t handle being on my own.”

Elsa tenses in Anna’s grip before twisting around to give her a Look. “Anna, that’s ridiculous.”

Anna rolls her eyes. “Sure, Miss I-can’t-just-tell-my-sister-I-miss-her-I-have-to-launch-into-our-tragic-backstory-and-almost-give-her-a-heart-attack.”

She feels more than see Elsa’s tiny huff of amusement. “Pretty long last name we have there.”

“Well, you know. With the royal-thing, and the half-Northuldra-thing…”

“And you still want to add Bjorgman to the end?” Elsa laughs, even as Anna jabs a finger into her side, but when they settle again she’s serious. “I’m sorry. For.”

Anna shrugs. It’s forgiveness and _I’m sorry too_ and _thank you for explaining_ all rolled into one, and Elsa seems to get that.[11] “We’re still kinda in the middle of it, huh?”

It comes out a little wistful. Elsa makes a soft _hm_ sound, and then scooches in even closer. “Yeah. Getting better, though.”

Anna smiles and laces Elsa’s bare fingers with her own. “All the time,” she agrees.


	2. Endnotes

1Title taken from "No Matter What," from _Steven Universe: The Movie_. Honestly, what a perfect song that encapsulates my current engagement with the Frozen franchise. I think I've mentioned in a few places now that I'm no longer really interested in writing or reading things that don't have any kind of thematic connection to the sequel. This doesn't mean that the first movie is now irrelevant--far from it--just that it feels reductive for me to think about those traumas and difficulties in the exact same way as I did before, as if the characters haven't changed or grown. And they have grown! They didn't spend the past three years rooting around their navels or trying to build sandcastle facsimiles of their lost past--they thought about all the terrible things that happened to them, and tried their best to move on. That was one of the hurdles I had to get past when writing this fic specifically, because it can't just be about Elsa trying to make up for lost time with Anna, which could have been written at any point post-Thaw, and if Elsa and Anna really DO miss each other so much after Frozen II that Anna's perpetually sending Elsa letters and Elsa's perpetually coming back, then there was no point in having Elsa move away in the first place. For this story to be worth writing, then, Anna and Elsa have to be content enough with the status quo to want to improve on it instead of throwing it out altogether. They have to be willing to respect the new boundaries between them, even if they weren't quite sure what those boundaries are yet. They have to be, as always, working through themselves and what they've been through, instead of wallowing.[return to text]

2That this is all being filtered through Anna's perspective was important as well. The underlying thread between two movies is that love is constantly being recontextualized for Anna: first she thought that it was the shield that could save her, then she realized that SHE was the shield, and her arc in the sequel was her being torn between wanting to always be that shield while slowly being made aware that she couldn't. The pendulum swung from "love can save me and everyone" to "I have to use my love to save everyone _why can't I do it why aren't I good enough_ " so what she has to do after the end, as I see it, is to find a happy medium. A lot of this paragraph is about table-setting her outlook: there's still that sense of self-effacement ("I don't wanna bother Elsa THAT much, she's busy") but it's tempered with the acknowledgement that she's also got her own things now.[return to text]

3Then there's the Kristoff of it all. Given what he went through in the sequel, it was very important to me that Kristoff be so completely in sync with Anna that he barely even has to think about it and it's ANNA who consciously thinks about it, appreciates, and learns from him. I just really love the guy, and what he brings to these movies, because...well, I think of it as the Luke-Leia-Han thing, where Luke and Leia are perpetually going off to Luke-and-Leia land where they have matching trauma luggage tags and the bad guys are abjectly evil and they're the ooooooonnnnnnllllyyyyy ones who can stop them and they'd probably just orbit around each other forever if someone didn't slap them both upside the head occasionally and remind them that other people in the world do exist, and that someone is usually Han. That's Kristoff post-sequel for me: I wanted him to be secure enough with their group dynamic that he no longer feels alienated when Elsa and Anna do their thing, while at the same time remaining somewhat separate from them, so that he CAN notice certain patterns of behavior. (Granted, that's what I thought their dynamic would ALREADY be, pre-sequel, but I guess I gave them too much credit.)[return to text]

4Ever since the sequel confirmed how fucking WEIRD Elsa is I haven't been able to stop myself from shouting it from the rooftops, and I love the idea that everyone who knows her for longer than three days has a compartment in their brain labeled "Just Things that Elsa Does." (For Anna and Kristoff it's probably a full file cabinet.) Anna's really giving her sister too much credit here, because I can't conceive of any reality where Elsa WOULDN'T be the worst storyteller in the universe--like, I'm picturing Marlin from Finding Nemo trying to get through one joke here. What she does and doesn't notice in the world is comprehensible only to the protean gods lurking in the depths of the sea, and she has NO grasp on metaphor or story structure whatsoever. She's probably okay at Pictionary, though.[return to text]

5The real reason that any of this is happening is obviously that Elsa can't read, so she has no idea what any of Anna's notes say and has to come home to find out. Aren't you all glad to learn this privileged behind-the-curtain information from my commentary?[return to text]

6It was important for me to highlight Elsa's strengths as queen here for two reasons: first, because I really don't think Elsa was BAD at being queen--the problem was never that she was bad for Arendelle (though that was undoubtedly the subject of some of her worst fears), even if she was kind of hopeless when it came to actually speaking to her subjects and finding out what they need (something that Anna I think just does effortlessly). Second, ANNA would definitely think that Elsa was the best queen, ever. I don't think Anna had any issues with how Elsa governed unless the issue had something to do with Elsa's personal wellbeing, because the idea just wouldn't occur to her--she was probably picking up the slack for Elsa in a lot of ways without even registering that that was what she was doing. The jump to Agnarr was something I wrestled with a little, but for all her misgivings about her parents I don't think Anna thinks that he was a bad KING; in fact, one of the reasons she resents him is because she thinks he sacrificed being a good father for the kingdom (in reality he did nothing of the sort, but that's neither here or there).[return to text]

7This decision--and the way that Anna makes it--is the pivot for the entire story. Because Anna before the sequel wouldn't have wanted to talk about it. Back then, she wouldn't have thought of Elsa's presence as anything but a good thing, and even if she DID think Elsa was trying to coddle her, she wouldn't have tried to bring it up, because she would have talked herself into just being grateful that she has her sister at all. The fact that she decides here that "no, my insecurities are worth talking about actually" is everything, because it shows that she now respects herself, and _her_ life as something separate from Elsa's life, as much as she respects Elsa's life and wellbeing. They made a promise at the end of the movie to be together AND apart, and she wants to make sure that they keep it. ('Course, she's Anna, so she has to call herself dumb first, which is...fine. We'll keep working on that.)[return to text]

8I think the Face looks at the same time very different and eerily similar for the two sisters: for Elsa it looks like these small but desperate attempts, aiming for happiness (and past-ness) that she never quite can reach, because she still doesn't really think she deserves it, and for Anna...the happiness looks TOO big on her face. It's the buoy she clings to when she's overwhelmed. That Kristoff knows both of these looks, and that he pieces them together to make the same whole--that's what makes Anna cry her heart out, because he knows her so well, and people really know her now, and they love her _so much_ , and still. And still.[return to text]

9Something I've always thought and wish I talked about more back in the day was that Anna probably DID give up on Elsa half a million times those thirteen years. She was only five when the Accident happened, and for the next decade and change Elsa was just furtive glimpses in the hallway. She WAS determined to reconnect, if only because there was literally no one else in the castle to talk to, but I think her efforts were more stop-and-start than like, this continued ceaseless devotion, because after a while Elsa WOULD start to feel like someone you'd just kinda lost touch with. She DID just slide past Elsa's door without knocking before their parents left, and she doesn't make any attempts to talk to Elsa (or even really thinks of Elsa directly) until Elsa talks to her first at the party. And it's something that I really appreciate when I think about Anna's character, because it shows that for all of the traumas that have made her this desperately lonely, self-sacrificial person, there was always that kernel of self-possession. She was ALWAYS strong enough to keep going without other people, even if she never consciously realized it.[return to text]

10I'm still not wholly satisfied with how this conversation turned out. It feels kind of rushed for all the emotional heavy-lifting that it's supposed to do, but I don't think it's been long enough for me to think of concrete ways to fix it. The crux of the matter is, of course, that Anna and Elsa are both still filtering the present through the past, but the ways that they're doing it show how much they've grown. For once it's Anna who's worried that this is another forever-limbo that they've trapped themselves in where neither of them can move on, and Elsa who's worried that this is just a temporary stopgap, where Anna's already got a whole independent life that she's just intruding upon. And they're both right and both wrong; the current status quo IS temporary, because eventually Elsa will just write back (if she ever learns how to write), but their relationship isn't, and neither is their constant reckoning with their pasts. They'll never be completely separated from the people they were, but they WILL keep changing and growing. The only way out is through.[return to text]

11Another something that I'm not too happy with. Neither of them should apologize here. Elsa didn't actually do anything wrong; she just did a neutral thing in a weird and slightly cryptic way, but that's just...who she is. Same goes for Anna's hyperactive imagination with regard to What Elsa Did and What It Could Mean. Neither of them have hurt the other. In some ways that was the point--that the two of them are still coming out of the period where they want to apologize for everything and everyone even as they're cottoning onto the fact that they don't need to--but to have it all end with a milquetoast "¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ guess we're both to blame" feels a little like a copout, particularly given how much I've been trying to avoid my old "meaning imparted by wordless action" characterization habits.[return to text]


End file.
